Sunday Morning

I was doing some research on ARTstor the other day. (ARTstor is an on-line repository of thousands of images from hundreds of institutions across the world. If you are looking for inspiration and Google images ain't doing it for ya, I highly recommend them.) I managed to come across the many variations of "Sunday morning" in art throughout the years. It seems that since the beginning, mornings on Sundays have been the kind of quiet, thoughtful, restorative moments that we all look forward to at the end of the week.Here are some of those Sunday mornings:

Sunday Morning in front of the Arch Street Meeting House, Philadelphia

Attributed to, John Lewis Krimmel, 1811- ca. 1813

Thomas Hovenden

Sunday Morning, 1881

Mary Heilmann

Sunday Morning, 1986

And of course:

Edward Hopper

Early Sunday Morning,

Things I am Thinking About This Week

-Sorry it's been so long. Sometimes the world makes too difficult for me to compose my thoughts. Between gay bashings, gay torturings, Obama's idiocy regarding DOMA and DADT, Carl Paladino's iciocy, a brief bout with a seasonal cold, and what might be a touch of early seasonal-affective disorder or plain old creative comedown, I have felt too spread out to make any real sense.

-We saw La Bête on Broadway, which starred a very underused David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley, being steamrolled over by the very good, but very exhausting and not particularly specifically-memorable, Mark Rylance. All the performances are quite lovely, but they are, sadly, weighted down by this play that, well, I just didn't want any part of after fifteen minutes. In writing circles, we might say "I am not the audience for this work."

-Delores Van Cartier, which is the name of the lounge-singer in disguise played by Whoopi Goldberg in "Sister Act," is the best name I've heard in a while.

-Is Sister Act ever really coming to Broadway?

-I found it fascinating that there was press regarding the fact that Jonathan Franzen's fantastic novel "Freedom" was not nominated for the National Book Award. (I found the book to be wholly-engrossing, purely pleasurable, and carefully, wisely written. Pretty fucking fantastic.) It was as if people couldn't stop talking about how they are ready to stop talking about it.

-Does anybody still order transcripts from television talk shows?

-Kip is sitting next to me on the couch, making us a White Tree of Gondor from aluminum armature and sculpey. I am the luckiest guy in the universe.

Reading in the Waterfalls Room at the Brooklyn Museum of Art